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I agree with this comment. The Americans would try to win over the populace by giving away rice and other supplies, but the NV would simply destroy collaborator

by nickff 5y ago

I agree with this comment. The Americans would try to win over the populace by giving away rice and other supplies, but the NV would simply destroy collaborators’ villages and murder their families. Bribes are nice, but extortion is much more effective.

jeromegv 5y ago
A bit simplistic. North Vietnamese we’re after all.. Vietnamese. It was natural for many in the south to support fellow countrymen against foreign invasion. It was first the Chinese, then the French and now the Americans. They were just done having foreign power take over their country. And don’t tell me the Americans didn’t do a lot of those things you just named. Wasn’t just “rice”.
- Taniwha 5y ago
  um yeah cough "Mỹ Lai" cough
  - 10xrubberduck 5y ago
    God, the Wikipedia page on this is absolutely horrifying: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/M%E1%BB%B9_Lai_massacre https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/M%E1%BB%B9_Lai_massacre
  - ncmncm 5y ago
    I gather Colin Powell got his boost from covering up My Lai.
refurb 5y ago
If anyone is interested, I'd highly recommend the book "Hanoi's War" by Lien-Hang Nguyen. She covers the war from the North Vietnamese side and got access to a lot of internal documents and interviewed the people involved. Maybe not surprisingly, the war was just as messy on the other side. Lots of internal dissent and power struggles over how it should be run. Giap and Ho Chi Minh (prior to his death) were much more on the "slow and steady" approach, open to negotiation, while Le Duan pushed the "go for broke" approach. Le Duan eventually won that argument. Giap did not believe the Tet Offensive was the right approach. In the run up to Tet '68, Giap was conveniently in Eastern Europe for "medical care" while his staff was jailed. Ho Chi Minh had already been relegated to a figure head at that point and didn't have much political power (he was also quite ill by then).
- the_af 5y ago
  All of what you said is true. This makes it doubly baffling about how the US approached the conflict. Instead of siding with a then amenable Ho Chi Minh, which would have made Vietnam if not an ally of the West, at least not totally hostile, they sided with the colonial power (the French) and against the national liberation movement. They even supported a dictator in the South that was so bad and unlikable, they later had to green light his assassination. And the ones that followed were inept and corrupt. There was just no way the US, siding with colonialism and conducting a war whose major success metric was body count (i.e. kill them all and pray they are all commies) would have been able to win that war. Short of totally wasting the whole of Vietnam, North and South, in which case they would have lost in the court of world opinion.
  - scaramanga 5y ago
    The US was an apartheid ethnostate so it's probably not that surprising that it sided with French colonists to restore their property rights as a matter of principle rather than pragmatic, geo-strategic consideration. Also, if you consider the Chinese response to these wars where the US was restoring the colonial system in a recently liberated Asia after the fall of Japan, it had desirable outcomes. China stifled it's economic growth by moving it's economic/industrial base deep into it's interior[0], since it felt that the cities on the coast were vulnerable to naval attacks, and areas near the borders of korea and vietnam would be vulnerable to US ground attack. This probably set back the Chinese economy severely, for decades. Edit: And, of course, you could argue that "kill them all" would be a successful dissuasion to prevent other states from declaring independence. eg. Indonesia and Philipines. Though I guess the effect on them was probably mixed(?) You have to consider that Korea is still partitioned, and South Korea is still a vassal state and military outpost of the US. Although the US was unable to achieve that outcome in Vietnam, it was not an unreasonable goal at the outset. [0]. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_Front_(China) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_Front_(China)
    - thematrixturtle 5y ago
      Wait what? Indonesia and the Philippines both became independent immediately after WW2, long before the Vietnam War. The "domino theory" was definitely in play, but that was about fear of Communist takeover in already-independent countries.

by nickff 5y ago

jeromegv 5y ago

A bit simplistic. North Vietnamese we’re after all.. Vietnamese. It was natural for many in the south to support fellow countrymen against foreign invasion. It was first the Chinese, then the French and now the Americans. They were just done having foreign power take over their country. And don’t tell me the Americans didn’t do a lot of those things you just named. Wasn’t just “rice”.

Taniwha 5y ago
um yeah cough "Mỹ Lai" cough
- 10xrubberduck 5y ago
  God, the Wikipedia page on this is absolutely horrifying: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/M%E1%BB%B9_Lai_massacre https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/M%E1%BB%B9_Lai_massacre
- ncmncm 5y ago
  I gather Colin Powell got his boost from covering up My Lai.

refurb 5y ago

If anyone is interested, I'd highly recommend the book "Hanoi's War" by Lien-Hang Nguyen. She covers the war from the North Vietnamese side and got access to a lot of internal documents and interviewed the people involved. Maybe not surprisingly, the war was just as messy on the other side. Lots of internal dissent and power struggles over how it should be run. Giap and Ho Chi Minh (prior to his death) were much more on the "slow and steady" approach, open to negotiation, while Le Duan pushed the "go for broke" approach. Le Duan eventually won that argument. Giap did not believe the Tet Offensive was the right approach. In the run up to Tet '68, Giap was conveniently in Eastern Europe for "medical care" while his staff was jailed. Ho Chi Minh had already been relegated to a figure head at that point and didn't have much political power (he was also quite ill by then).

the_af 5y ago
All of what you said is true. This makes it doubly baffling about how the US approached the conflict. Instead of siding with a then amenable Ho Chi Minh, which would have made Vietnam if not an ally of the West, at least not totally hostile, they sided with the colonial power (the French) and against the national liberation movement. They even supported a dictator in the South that was so bad and unlikable, they later had to green light his assassination. And the ones that followed were inept and corrupt. There was just no way the US, siding with colonialism and conducting a war whose major success metric was body count (i.e. kill them all and pray they are all commies) would have been able to win that war. Short of totally wasting the whole of Vietnam, North and South, in which case they would have lost in the court of world opinion.
- scaramanga 5y ago
  The US was an apartheid ethnostate so it's probably not that surprising that it sided with French colonists to restore their property rights as a matter of principle rather than pragmatic, geo-strategic consideration. Also, if you consider the Chinese response to these wars where the US was restoring the colonial system in a recently liberated Asia after the fall of Japan, it had desirable outcomes. China stifled it's economic growth by moving it's economic/industrial base deep into it's interior[0], since it felt that the cities on the coast were vulnerable to naval attacks, and areas near the borders of korea and vietnam would be vulnerable to US ground attack. This probably set back the Chinese economy severely, for decades. Edit: And, of course, you could argue that "kill them all" would be a successful dissuasion to prevent other states from declaring independence. eg. Indonesia and Philipines. Though I guess the effect on them was probably mixed(?) You have to consider that Korea is still partitioned, and South Korea is still a vassal state and military outpost of the US. Although the US was unable to achieve that outcome in Vietnam, it was not an unreasonable goal at the outset. [0]. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_Front_(China) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_Front_(China)
  - thematrixturtle 5y ago
    Wait what? Indonesia and the Philippines both became independent immediately after WW2, long before the Vietnam War. The "domino theory" was definitely in play, but that was about fear of Communist takeover in already-independent countries.